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Microsoft Pirating Their Own Software?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the piracy-is-eeeeeeeevilllll dept.

14ghz writes "Microsoft gave out copies of .NET Visual Studio Pro to attendees of the Microsoft .NET Student Tour. Despite the discs saying "UNLICENSED SOFTWARE -- Illegal without separate license from Microsoft", the freebie didn't contain any license document, and one guy decided to ask the MS conference rep about it. Read the in-progress story."

3 of 469 comments (clear)

  1. Discretionary licensing by mfh · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's totally up to Microsoft to determine how to license their software, and whom to license it to.

    What's the fuss? They could license it for free use to recovering crack addicts that live on the 3000 block of 1st street that wear green pants if they wanted to.

    As long as some marketing monkey at MS has the OK from the higher-ups, then it's all good.

    --
    The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
  2. Re:Not pirated by AnotherShep · · Score: 5, Interesting

    On the back of the sleeve the first CD is in. I got the same CDs at an event on the same tour.

  3. Civility, please? by Chymaera · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Although it was wise for the submitter to check whether he was on solid legal grounds, it seems most uncivil of him to bring all this attention to the employee over such a relatively minor matter as this. Sasha seemed to be handling the problem with all expediency, and I imagine the issue would have been resolved had submitter merely waited and continued to correspond with him. Now tens of thousands of people know about this and Sasha risks getting in trouble with his superiors.

    Submitting the site to slashdot was unjustified in light of how the problem was being handled, and it was a breach of trust on the part of the submitter.